Richardson ISD's smallest scholars experiment with ‘flipped’ classes

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Michael Ainsworth/Staff Photographer

From left: Kindergartners Hasan Rizvi, Kaitlyn Benitez and Diamond Allen watch a video produced by their teacher, Sara Larkin, at the MST Magnet School in Richardson. The video is usually watched at home, and prepares children for a lesson at the school the next day. It is part of the school's experiment with "flipping" the classroom.

The eager kindergarten class was primed to talk about how animals move. Their teacher didn’t need to start with the basics because almost all of her charges had watched a short video at home that she’d assigned the day before.

The kids went straight to show-and-tell, proudly showing their “Miss Larkin” drawings or pictures they’d brought of a variety of critters — from a grasshopper to a jaguar — and describing how they hopped, jumped, ran or walked.

“I can run,” their teacher, Sara Larkin, read from one paper. “Is that something people can do?”

“Yes!” was the enthusiastic response from the class.

The “flipped” classroom is a cutting-edge education concept. Information normally presented in a lecture is put on a video that students watch at home, usually online. Exercises that would be given as homework are done in class — where the teacher and other students offer live backup and discussion.

The flipped concept is finding a growing niche with students in higher grades where, say, the basics of adding fractions make for an obvious video topic. But one elementary school in Richardson ISD is taking an unusual step and testing the technique with its youngest students.

At least one teacher in every grade at the Math, Science and Technology Magnet is testing flipping — all the way down to Larkin’s kindergarten class.

Neither Larkin nor her bosses had a clear idea of what elementary school flipping would look like — much less kinder-flipping — when they decided on the pilot project.

“It started out truly as a trial, with a few brave people willing to try it,” said Charis Hunt, Richardson’s executive director for college and career readiness.

Flipping is not simply a replacement for traditional education strategies. It may not be suitable for every student — or every teacher. There are issues of tech access at home that must be dealt with. And for the youngest students, there must be an adult at home committed to making sure that the child watches the video.

Teachers at MST are creating no more than one video per week. Based on a couple of months’ experience, the reviews are better than good. The program will continue at MST — and may well be expanded later this year.

“I think it’s working way better than I thought it would,” said Morgan Griffin, the first-grade teacher piloting the experiment at MST.

Her most recent video introduced her students to three-dimensional shapes, from the sphere to the rectangular prism. The kids were told to bring examples to class the next day. There were lots of spheres, a few cubes, and one cone — a Christmas tree candle.

Instead of taking extensive class time to introduce the students to the names of the shapes, Griffin quickly moved to identifying the faces and vertices.

Trend’s origins

Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams were high school chemistry teachers in Colorado back in 2007 when they decided to invert the traditional lecture/homework system. They were hardly alone in identifying widespread online access to video as a teaching tool. But they came up with a catchy name and spread the idea to thousands of educators.

And they literally wrote the book on the subject: Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day.

Bergmann said last week that he always poses one question to teachers.

“What is the best use of your face-to-face class time? There are a lot of right answers,” he said. “But there is a wrong answer: Sitting up there in front of your kids and yakking to all of them at the same time.”

Hunt attended a summer conference where Bergmann and Sams spoke and she wondered about bringing the idea to younger students. MST Magnet seemed like a good fit. Each of about 630 students is there because a parent or guardian requested it. So the students and parents might be more attuned to tech than those at other schools.

But would the youngest children be able to access the videos at home? Would the teachers be able to create effective videos without taking too much time, and with only the software available on school-issued iPads?

Sams and Bergmann know of only isolated attempts to introduce flipping to the youngest students. Bergmann now works at a K-8 school where kindergarten teachers are using it to help teach phonics.

That mostly left the teachers at MST to work it out amongst themselves.

“I guess I invented the recipe,” Larkin said of adapting flipping for her class. “But it was with a lot of help.”

The concept at work

Here’s how it works:

Every week or so, the teachers come up with an idea that is simple enough to be explained in less than five minutes — about three minutes for the earliest grades. The teachers record the video themselves and post it to the school Web server. (The videos are far from flashy, but the only production values needed to get little kids excited to watch their teachers in “movies” are that the sound be loud enough and the picture focused.)

And they tell the students to watch. The kindergarten students even go home that day with a small sticker on their shirts that reads, “I need to watch a video tonight!”

Both Larkin and Griffin say that the vast majority of students do watch — on technology that ranges from smartphones to tablets to “traditional” computers. For students who aren’t able to watch at home for whatever reason, there’s no reprimand. They get a couple of minutes to watch the video on one of several classroom computers before the discussion gets under way.

The teachers say a video of two or three minutes watched at home saves 20 or 30 minutes of class time and lets the kids absorb the concepts at their own pace, watching it repeatedly if they need. It also gives parents an unprecedented window into what their children are learning at school.

“All they usually get is ‘it was fun,’” said MST principal Angela Vaughan, “or ‘I had pizza for lunch.’”

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